Recording and reproduction of digital data in large quantity have been often performed in recent years. It is now desirable to increase a recording density for a magnetic recording medium such as a magnetic tape, a magnetic disk or the like. In order to increase the recording density, a high-efficiency modulation scheme is used as a digital-data modulation scheme, and a reduction in track width or a decrease in track pitch has been performed as well as the shortening of a recording wavelength.
However, when the track pitch is shortened, crosstalk noise increases due to the leakage of magnetic flux from an adjacent track and hence S/N (signal-to-noise) is reduced or an error rate deteriorates. While a azimuth angle has heretofore been increased to reduce the crosstalk noise, this is on its way to becoming the limit due to a reduction in effective recording speed. Namely, it has been difficult to increase the recording density by azimuth-recording in a narrow track width.
An object of the present invention is to provide a magnetic recording apparatus and a magnetic recording method or the like capable of easily implementing azimuth-recording in a narrow track width.